


Pure/Impure

by Miss_M



Category: Cracks (2009)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Anger, Catharsis, Confrontations, F/F, Post-Canon, Teacher-Student Relationship, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-23
Updated: 2016-10-23
Packaged: 2018-08-24 03:16:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,690
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8354779
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_M/pseuds/Miss_M
Summary: The day when the red sashes were discarded had been for all of them. This was for Di alone.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [etoilecourageuse](https://archiveofourown.org/users/etoilecourageuse/gifts).



> This is a treat. I own nothing.

Di left her suitcase in the care of Mr. Wilkins the shopkeeper. He made no comment when she told him she wanted to pay Miss G a brief visit, but he did give Di what some of the novels the girls passed around at night would have called a significant look.

Di pretended not to notice. She told herself Mr. Wilkins’ eyes on her back lent her purpose as she climbed the stairs, like little wings had been attached to her heels. She did not rush, for she was not ashamed of being here. Her intention fortified her, even as her hand trembled when she raised it to knock. 

She squeezed her hand into a fist, but before her knuckles could touch wood there was the sound of sudden movement from within, and the door flew open. 

“Fia…!” The woman in the room cried out as she flung open the door.

Di fell back a step, startled, then was instantly furious with herself. She would not allow anything to sway her from her course, not again. Not even the sight of Miss G’s face, pale without makeup, her frizzy hair, her plain, somber clothes, almost like a nun’s habit. 

“What are you doing here?” Miss G asked, her eyes darting as though she expected to see someone else lurking behind Di in the dim corridor. 

“There’s no one else here,” Di said, her heartbeat slowing down with the steady, measured march of her words. “Fiamma gave me her perfume the day before she died, didn’t you know that?”

Di advanced into the room, entered it without waiting for an answer or permission from Miss G. She wouldn’t beg, not now. 

Miss G retreated back from the door, allowing Di inside. Di shut the door, but didn’t look for a deadbolt or a key in the lock. She would not stay long. She had little to say, important though it was.

Even so, once the door was shut and she stood facing Miss G, alone again, Di grasped after the right words, which refused to come. Once, last term, she had begged a cigarette off Miss G, who had given it with a brilliant, vermillion smile, on the condition that Di came up with five polysyllabic words to describe the experience of smoking it. Di’d shared the cigarette with Poppy, behind the chapel after supper that night. They’d both giggled as though drunk on sherry and hadn’t been able to think of a single long word. Emboldened, after lights out that night Di had dared to touch herself under her pajamas, rather than over them as until then. She’d bitten her lip bloody while her body had trembled and gushed, and in Di’s mind Miss G had laughed and laughed.

“What do you want, Di?” 

Miss G’s voice, her face in shadow because she stood with her back to the window, the thin, grey light picking out the hairs on her head like strands of seaweed – it all helped to sharpen Di’s focus. It always had done, since Miss G had first noticed her and made her team captain. Miss G had been the north to Di’s compass. Di could always find her, even without looking, though she had liked to look.

She did not like to look now. The sight of Miss G, pale and drab, filled her with a rage very like but not quite loathing. The words came to her at last. 

“I wanted to tell you that I see you now. I see all of you. You’ve never been anywhere, you’ve never done anything. You stole everything. Everything you told us was a lie, all your, your books and your stories…”

“I told you the truth in those stories,” Miss G interrupted quietly. Di felt obliged to let her speak. She trembled with the anger of her own unfinished speech, Miss G still pulling at her, irresistible. “I told you the only truth worth knowing.”

Di advanced, carried on the wings of her anger, all her unspoken wants. She was shorter than Miss G, but all that diving and swimming had made her strong. She seized Miss G by the arms and shook her, as though Miss G had been the child. Miss G did not try to defend herself, her eyes downcast, her form limp in Di’s grip, infuriating Di even more.

“The truth?” she shouted in Miss G’s face. A fleck of her spit fell on Miss G’s cheek, but the older woman did not seem to notice. 

Di felt wild, she had to make Miss G acknowledge her, she was owed that much. She released one of Miss G’s arms, so she could seize a fistful of Miss G’s heavy skirts, lift them, and reach under the fustian. Miss G squirmed but did not fight as Di found thin culottes, warm skin, then coarse hair and wet flesh, moist like a sea creature, but warm. 

“The only truth you taught us was how to pay court to you,” Di raged as he hand searched and found. “Fiamma wouldn’t desire you, and so you only wanted her. Why did you only want _her_?”

“Di, don’t,” Miss G whispered, her voice thin as smoke, her eyes still avoiding Di’s. 

Di’s fingers curled as anger spiked through her. Miss G gasped. Di repeated the motion, felt Miss G grow wetter and warmer as she averted her face from Di, and panted, and trembled in Di’s grip. 

“I’m not Di. I’m Diana.” Her voice was shrill. She couldn’t help it. “I’m Diana!”

She could have gone on then, emptied her mind, let what her body had learned to do to itself be done to Miss G.

Di snatched her hand out of Miss G’s drawers, pushed Miss G away as she might push a gypsy child clinging to her coat, begging for a penny. 

Miss G stumbled, her hip struck the corner of the little table by her bed, upsetting the objects arranged on the tabletop. Di started to move toward her, to her aid, to be close to Miss G where she lay crumpled on the bare floorboards. 

Di stopped herself before she’d taken more than half a step. What she had learned, she could unlearn. She was not Di any more – she was Diana. 

Her attention was arrested by the five objects scattered across the little table. Five: an elephant, a hippo, a porcelain dish like a kohl jar missing its lid, a folded fan Diana knew showed a woman in a kimono standing on a bridge under a weeping willow, and a photograph. It lay face down under the upended kohl jar, but Diana did not need to turn it over to know what it depicted: them, Miss G’s special girls. 

With a wordless roar, Diana swept all five objects onto the floor. The fan cracked, and the kohl jar smashed to pieces. The photograph vanished under the bed. Diana’s rage seemed inexhaustible, every time she let it out it came back stronger, like the tide on the rocks.

Miss G’s hand reached out toward Diana’s foot. No: toward the little elephant carved out of a real elephant’s tusk, which lay on the floor by Diana’s foot. A keepsake of something which never happened, a simulacrum of a real thing. 

Diana looked around, at the four shabby walls, the window framing a bit of grey sky. She laid her hand on the doorknob. Miss G still hadn’t looked at her. 

“I worshipped you,” Diana said, her anger giving way to a tiredness and a sorrow and a disappointment without measure or end. 

At last, at last, Miss G looked up, her eyes dull as pebbles. She looked small, crouched on the floor amidst her broken treasures. 

“Would you like me to apologize?” she asked hoarsely, plainly, as though it made little difference to her what Diana would choose either way.

Diana shook her head fiercely. She suspected the memory of Miss G looking so pitiful would do her a world of good, but still everything in Diana rebelled against seeing her like that. 

Diana put steel in her spine, lifted her chin, assumed her clearest tone. “Fare thee well, Ozymandias,” she intoned. Then she opened the door, passed through it, and shut it behind her without looking back into the room. The final flourish felt less satisfying than she had hoped, but Diana was glad she had gone through with it.

At the pier, she had nearly an hour to wait before the ferry’s departure. She put her suitcase down and looked at her right hand. She put two fingers in her mouth: it tasted the same as she, Diana, herself did, not different or unique at all. 

Leaving her suitcase at the top of the stone stairs, Diana crouched on the last stair above the water and washed her hand in the sea. The tidal slime had dried on the stair, and the sun broke through the clouds. Diana began to sweat, her lisle stockings itched. She sat at the top of the stairs, unlaced her sensible shoes, rolled down and pulled off her stockings. Putting her shoes back onto bare feet, she felt much better. 

A knot of women stood gossiping in front of the fishmonger’s. Diana could tell they were staring at her, with her bare legs. She reveled in it, swam and turned somersaults in the ebb and flow of their looks. She would go to Paris first. It was cheap to live there, and one could meet all sorts of people, even if it was as dirty as Fiamma had claimed. Diana didn’t need to linger in Paris or anywhere – as soon as another door opened, she’d go through it and never look back.

As she sat and waited for the ferry, Diana refined the details of her plan. She would buy shoes with a heel and buckles, made of green satin with embroidered pink peonies. She would wear perfume and go dancing and walk the streets of every city without fear. 

She would be worth waiting for. She would be a great success. She felt like a scandal already.


End file.
